White policemen patrol black neighborhoods, less as guardians of public safety than troops subduing occupied territory. They hassle young black men, subjecting them to “random” searches. Sometimes–too often–they shoot them. All-white juries acquit them, validating tall tales of squirt guns and wallets and shadows that look like guns.

Our prisons look like America–the part of America that’s downtown and predominantly African-American. Being born black means you’ll probably attend substandard, poorly funded schools, that you’ll earn less than if you’d been born another race. You’ll get sick more often and die sooner. Why aren’t these life-shattering, soul-crushing injustices, rather than the overzealous prosecution of the schoolyard thugs known as the “Jena 6,” attracting thousands of marchers?

I used to live on a street next to a strip of park created to separate my neighborhood–which was white–from Harlem. On my side of the park the New York ritual called “alternate side of the street parking” required motorists to move their cars daily. This cleared the way for street sweepers and garbage pickup. It was clean and safe. My morning walk down the park’s stairs to the subway illustrated the nature of systemic racism.

Each step was crumblier, more trash-strewn. On the east side of the park, where every face was brown, the garbagemen came once a week. Bags of refuse broke open, their contents whipped around in those little wind vortexes that spring up in urban spaces. When the light in a lamppost blew out on the Harlem side, it stayed out for months. Many of the buildings had been abandoned.

African-Americans live lives whose despair is amplified by petty nonsense. At our post office, the clerk always demanded that my black roommate show an ID to pick up his packages. She never asked me. (Racism is complicated. She was black.) Boutiques on Madison Avenue buzzed me in wearing ripped jeans and a Dead Kennedys T-shirt; they ignored him in a suit and tie. I’m not surprised that blacks are pissed off. The shock is that they haven’t burned down the whole country.

The Jena 6 hype is bizarre, while countless innocent African-American men rot in prison–some on death row–unjustly convicted because they couldn’t afford decent lawyers.

According to a website set up for their legal defense fund, “The Jena Six are a group of black students who are being charged with attempted murder for beating up a white student who was taunting them with racial slurs, and continued to support other white students who hung three nooses from the high school’s ‘white tree’ which sits in the front yard.” (The charges have since been reduced to aggravated assault.) The implication is obvious: “hate speech” justifies physical assault.

Justin Barker, 17, was beaten unconscious and then kicked repeatedly. A sturdy sort, he spent three hours in the emergency room before attending the school’s Ring Ceremony later the same day. The accused, members of the school football team, claim that Barker had made fun of one of them for having himself been beaten up by a group of white students at an earlier event, one of a string of racially-charged incidents in the small town. Barker denies it.

“Young white males involved in the racial incidents received slaps on the wrist, at most, while young blacks received school expulsions or criminal charges,” wrote Clarence Page in The Chicago Tribune. One of the Jena 6 remains in jail despite having had his conviction overturned. That’s wrong. But, said Justice Department attorney Donald Washington, “There was no connection between the September noose incident and December attack [on Barker].” Furthermore, reports the Associated Press, “the three youths accused of hanging the nooses were not suspended for just three days–they were isolated at an alternative school for about a month, and then given an in-school suspension for two weeks.”

“They haven’t always been fair in the courthouse with us. If you’re black, they go overboard sometimes,” says Jena High School janitor Braxton Hatcher, 62, who is black. That’s easy to believe. Then he repeats the standard talking point: “I think this was just a fight between boys. I don’t think it was attempted murder.”

Six against one isn’t a schoolyard fight. I’ve been in more than my fair share of schoolyard fights, so I know. Fights are one on one. Six on one is attempted murder. Kicking someone after they’ve passed out is attempted murder. Nothing Barker said, no matter how foul, can justify such a vicious assault by bullying jocks. This is the stuff of Columbine.

Symbolic hate speech, even as vile as nooses in the context of the recent history of the Deep South, pales next to actual physical violence. The real problem is that there’s a perception that attempted murder charges wouldn’t have been filed had the races of the students involved in the Barker beatdown been reversed.

Indeed, the Urban League finds that the average black man convicted of aggravated assault–the charge pending against five of the Jena 6–faces 48 months in prison if convicted, a term about one-third longer than if he’d been white. And the Justice Department says black men who get arrested are three times more likely than whites to end up in prison.

What white apologists call the legacy of racism–does a continuing phenomenon leave a legacy?–wrecks the lives of millions of Americans. Consider the following:

“Statistically,” reports The Los Angeles Times, “black males in America are at increased risk for just about every health problem known. African Americans have a shorter life expectancy than any other racial group in America except Native Americans, and black men fare even worse than black women…It is possible, [researchers now] believe, that the ill health and premature deaths can be laid–at least in part–at the feet of continuous assaults of discrimination, real or perceived…The reaction contributes to a chain of biological events known as the stress response, which can put people at higher risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and infectious disease, says Namdi Barnes, a [UCLA] researcher…for many African Americans, these responses may occur so frequently that they eventually result in a breakdown of the physiological system.”

In short, racism kills.

As one wag observed, the Jena 6 are no Rosa Parks. In the face of the intractable challenge of a nation so racist that it literally makes people ill, however, what passes for a civil rights movement finds that it’s easier to set its sights low.

(C) 2007 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.

Antiwar Left Shuns Iraqis

“What non-violent antiwar activists are unable to realize,” writes Peter Gelderloos, “is that the most important resistance, probably the only significant resistance, to the occupation of Iraq is the resistance being waged by the Iraqi people themselves.” This comes from a relatively tangential passage in a thought-provoking book, “How Non-Violence Protects the State,” that will get a more detailed look in a future column.

Although its appearance in The Nation guaranteed it would receive scant notice, a July 30 essay by Alexander Cockburn was one of the first to seriously address the most troubling internal contradiction of the anti-Iraq War left. War, everyone knows, is a zero-sum game. For one side to win, the other has to lose. If you “support our troops” you hope, at minimum, for their safe return. But each day a U.S. soldier survives at the front means another day he will occupy Iraq and another day he can kill Iraqi resistance forces. Supporting the troops, as right-wingers say, requires supporting their mission. Which means opposing the guys who are trying to kill them.

Cockburn quoted antiwar activist Lawrence McGuire: “The grand taboo of the antiwar movement is to show the slightest empathy for the resistance fighters in Iraq. They are never mentioned as people for whom we should show concern, much less admiration. But of course, if you are going to sympathize with the U.S. soldiers, who are fighting a war of aggression, then surely you should also [my emphasis] sympathize with the soldiers who are fighting for their homeland.” (An intellectually honest person would substitute “instead” for “also.”)

It kills me to say this, but neocon madman William Kristol was correct when he wrote in The Weekly Standard: “What mattered to the left was that it was dangerous politically not to ‘support the troops.’ Of course the antiwar left hated what the troops were doing…So ‘supporting the troops’ meant feeling sorry for them, or pretending to.”

The 2004 discussion over U.S. soldiers who bought their own body plates, and resorted to “hillbilly armor” to protect their Humvees from roadside bombs, was a case in point. Antiwar pundits, including me, tried to drive a wedge between the Bush Administration and the military by pointing out that the Pentagon was pinching pennies at the expense of soldiers’ lives. But what if you’re an Iraqi? You risk your own life every time you place an IED along the “Highway of Death” between Baghdad and the airport. The more Americans you blow up, the closer you come to achieving your goal of liberating Iraq. The last thing you need is “antiwar” Americans agitating for stronger armor plates!

A parallel to World War II, “the good war” depicted in countless movies, is useful. You’re a German citizen living in Berlin, and you hate the Nazis. You’re against the war. Do you pray for the SS? Or the French Resistance? You can’t do both. (Well, you could–but you’d be an idiot.)

The moral quandry forced upon the left is epitomized by Phyllis Bennis, an in-the-box wonk for the Institute for Policy Studies. “Certainly,” she allows, “the Iraqi people have the right to resist an illegal occupation, including military resistance.” Which is, as they said in the 1970s, mighty white of her. “But as a whole,” she continues, “what is understood to be ‘the Iraqi resistance’ against the U.S. occupation is a disaggregated and diverse set of largely unconnected factions, in which the various often-antagonistic armed movements (including some who attack Iraqi civilians as much as they do occupation troops) hold pride of place. There is no unified leadership that can speak for ‘the resistance,’ there is no NLF or ANC or FMLN that can claim real leadership and is accountable to the Iraqi population as a whole.”

For most of World War II, the same was true of the French Resistance (history grants them the upper-case “R”) too. Communists, socialists and even monarchists fought the Germans–and each other–until Charles de Gaulle’s center-right faction prodded, bullied and ultimately muscled out his (more popular and more progressive) rivals. There were, as in Iraq today, French criminal gangs who fought solely for money. If this was 1943 and Bennis and other mainstream liberals were anti-Nazi Germans, would they “support what is called ‘the French resistance'”?

As their Iraqi counterparts do today, the Free French carried out what the press of the period called “terrorist attacks.” Kidnappings, assassinations and bombings were usually directed at government officials, German troops, and French collaborators–but civilians were also killed. So why does the antiwar left find the Iraqis distasteful?

Gelderloos argues that the post-Vietnam American left is hard-wired with reflexive pacifism, denying that violent militancy can ever be a valid tactic, even when faced with horrific oppression. Liberals frequently express disapproval of protestors who smashed windows at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, and the Earth Liberation Front’s (ELF) torching of SUVs at auto dealerships–even though no one got hurt.

Knee-jerk non-violence partly explains the left’s reluctance to embrace the Iraqi resistance. Nationalism/patriotism is another factor. Who wants to see more funerals of American soldiers? And who wants to be smeared as the next “Hanoi Jane”?

When “asked who I think will then take power [after U.S. forces leave Iraq],” Bennis writes, “the only thing I can anticipate with any confidence is that first, I probably won’t like them very much because they’re likely to have a far more religious orientation than I like but that second, it’s not up to me to choose who governs Iraq.”

The Islamist and/or totalitarian ideology of many of Iraq’s anti-U.S. factions is a turn-off to the secular American left. The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland worried aloud in late 2003, when the war against the occupation of Iraq heated up: “Not all of Iraq’s resistance will fit [a] romantic, maquis image. Some will be Baathist holdouts, Saddamites who once served as henchmen to a murderous dictator. No progressive should want to see these villains land a blow on British or American forces.” This year, in the socialist New Politics, Stephen Shalom noted that “to give our automatic support to any opponent of U.S. imperialism means we should have supported the Taliban in 2001 or Saddam Hussein in 2003.”

Since war is a zero-sum game, it’s our guys or theirs. “Support the troops by bringing them home” is an empty slogan that belies reality. With both political parties supporting the war, U.S. troops are not going to come home any time soon. As Gelderloos writes: “The approach of the U.S. antiwar movement in relation to the Iraqi resistance does not merely qualify as bad strategy; it reveals a total lack of strategy, and it is something we need to fix.” It also exposes an ugly truth about antiwar lefties. They don’t believe in national self-determination any more than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

(Ted Rall is the author of the book “America Gone Wild,” which includes a detailed behind-the-scenes look at the most controversial political cartoons of the post-9/11 era.)

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

Democrats Lie to Prolong Iraq; Reporters Go Along

Americans don’t know how their government works. Democrats, in control of Congress, are taking advantage of our ignorance to continue the Iraq War. Which brings up two questions: Why won’t the “antiwar” Democrats act to stop the carnage? And why aren’t reporters calling them on it?

“Democrats,” writes Charles Babington in an Associated Press item that appeared in hundreds of newspapers, “control both chambers [of Congress] but lack the numbers to override President Bush’s vetoes of bids to mandate troop withdrawals from Iraq.” It’s a half-truth at best: the Democrats’ narrow majority is less than the two-thirds majority they’d need to override a presidential veto. Here’s the full truth: it doesn’t matter.

The Constitution grants Congress, and only the Congress, to “raise and support armies.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could meet over cocktails right now and cut off the funding tomorrow. Within a few months, the Pentagon would run out of money for the war. They’d have to start bringing home troops. The occupation of Iraq would be over in less than a year.

In June Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s Extra! Magazine wrote: “If the Democrat-controlled Congress wanted to force the Bush administration to accept a bill with a withdrawal timeline, it didn’t have to pass the bill over Bush’s veto–it just had to make clear that no Iraq War spending bill without a timeline would be forthcoming.”

Democratic leaders know that. And here’s how I know they know: days after taking control of Congress, on January 30, they invited five constitutional law experts to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask them how they could end the war. Four out of five of the experts swore that the Democrats could stop the Iraq War just…like…that.

“I think the constitutional scheme does give Congress broad authority to terminate a war,” affirmed Bradford Berenson, Bush’s White House associate counsel from 2001 to 2003. “It is ultimately Congress that decides the size, scope and duration of the use of military force,” added Walter Dellinger, former acting solicitor general and assistant attorney general.
“Today we’ve heard convincing testimony and analysis that Congress has the power to stop the war if it wants to,” said Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI). Yet eight months later, there’s still no end in sight.

The Dems won the 2006 elections with promises to end the war. Weeks after taking over Congress, however, Republicans spooked them with one of the most ludicrous talking points of all time. Cutting off the money, they said, would abandon U.S. soldiers at the front, their ammo dwindling as Al Qaeda insurgents swarmed over them. (Actually–the fact that I have to write this speaks to the American right’s intellectual dishonesty–the troops would go to the airport. They would board airplanes. They would fly home.)

Democrats worry that they’ll be portrayed as weak on defense if they act unilaterally to pull out of Iraq. Irony of ironies, they’re wussing out to avoid looking wimpy. Forcing Republicans to vote with them to end the war, they calculate, would give them political cover. Extra! continued: “Democrats may not have wanted to pay the supposed political costs of [cutting off funding], but news coverage should have made clear that this was a choice, not something forced on them by the lack of a veto-proof majority.”

Rather than set the record straight, the media continues to spread the Democrats-can’t-stop-the-Republican-war meme this week:

Michael Duffy, Time magazine: “If Democrats had more votes–particularly in the House–they might be able to force Bush to change course. But Bush will fight any resolution fencing him in with a veto that, as things stand now, the Democrats cannot override. But the President’s critics will continue to try, hoping to attract moderate Republicans who are fearful of losing their seats next year.” Occasionally Time invites me to its Christmas party. If I score an invite this year, my present for their fact-checkers will be a copy of the Constitution.

Marcella Bombardieri, The Boston Globe: “In the Senate, Democrats have only a 51 to 49 majority, far from the 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster and the 67 needed to override a presidential veto. All efforts to force a troop withdrawal have failed, and the party will have to count on substantial Republican defections to make any further progress this fall.” I’ll be checking the Globe for a retraction.

Brian Knowlton, The New York Times: Knowlton dutifully quoted Democratic Senator Joe Biden’s claim that there were “political limits on his party, even with the Congressional majority it has held since the November midterm elections. ‘This is the president’s war,’ [Biden] said. ‘Unless we get 67 votes to override his veto, there’s nothing we can do to stop this war…'” Not only did the Times fail to call Biden on his brazen lie, it gave him the last word.

You’d think the Democrats would want to end the Iraq War before their likely retaking of the White House, but that’s because you’re a human being, not a politician. Politicians are happy to dispatch hundreds of young American men and women to certain death (along with thousands of Iraqis), if the bloodshed squeezes out an extra half percentage point at the polls. Reid and Pelosi prefer to run against a disastrous ongoing Republican war than point to a fragile Democratic-brokered peace.

Why are so many respected journalists parroting the Democratic party line? I suspect that corporate media culture, rather than Judith Miller-style malfeasance, is largely to blame. Ink-stained newsrooms have been replaced by bullpen offices indistinguishable from those of banks or insurance companies. Reporters used to come from the working classes. They distrusted politicians and businessmen, and politicians and businessmen loathed them. Today’s journalists are products of cookie-cutter journalism schools. Because graduate schools rarely offer scholarships, few come from the lower or middle classes. They look like businessmen. When they meet a politician, they see a possible friend. They wear suits and ties. And when a U.S. senator like Joe Biden feeds them a line of crap, they gobble it up.

(Ted Rall is the author of the book “America Gone Wild,” which includes a detailed behind-the-scenes look at the most controversial political cartoons of the post-9/11 era.)
COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

Phony Poverty Study Fools Lazy Journalists

They’re baaack! Once again the Heritage Foundation is mangling statistics to whitewash the ugly facts of life in Republican-run America.

Last time, in 2005, they attacked the image of U.S. soldiers as cannon fodder being exploited for Halliburton. Au contraire, claimed the conservative propaganda mill. American troops, they said were actually “wealthier, more educated and more rural than the average” citizen. Of course, this wasn’t true. “Military personnel are poorer and less educated” than the average Joe, I found when I took a closer look. Heritage’s soldier study used junk logic and apples-to-oranges statistics to promote the GOP’s wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. And it worked.

The lazy men who run the big newspapers and TV networks, deluded into believing there are two sides to every story, dutifully repeated Heritage’s lies. They never questioned a word. More soldiers died. The Heritage story made us feel less guilty about it.

Now Heritage is telling us that there are no poor people–very few, anyway, and then only for short periods of time–in the United States. The truth is that capitalism is failing millions of Americans. The less we think about the problem, the less we think it is a problem, the worse it will become.

The pseudoacademic demagogues of the right want us to distrust our own eyes. Panhandlers? “Homeless by choice” urban campers, Ronald Reagan, patron saint of modern Republicanism, called them. Single mothers? He said they were “welfare queens.” Americans who live in the sprawling slums of the inner cities, the washed-up Walmarted Main Streets of the farm belt, and the scary barred-window suburbs of California and Georgia and Illinois? They’re living large, says the Heritage Foundation in a “study” whose dubious findings have already been reprinted–completely unquestioned, as usual–by hundreds of newspapers read by millions of gullible subscribers.

The Census Bureau says that 36.5 million Americans–one in eight–are poor. But “if poverty means a lack of nutritious food, adequate warm housing, and clothing for a family, then very few of the people identified as living ‘in poverty’ would, in fact, be characterized as poor,” says Heritage’s Robert Rector. “The typical person defined as ‘poor’ by the Census has cable or satellite TV, air conditioning, a microwave, a DVD player or VCR, and two color TVs.”

No doubt, poor people in a technologically advanced nation like the United States don’t live as minimally as those in undeveloped states like Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, on the other hand, a middle-class American homeowner would be spectacularly wealthy. A man worth $500,000 could become a warlord. There are no Afghan billionaires. Poverty is relative.
Even the claim that gadget ownership is incompatible with true poverty doesn’t hold up: Rector refers to “a DVD player or VCR.” But VCRs are antiquated, a decade out of date. It’s like saying that someone who owns “a computer or a typewriter” isn’t poor.

“Poor Americans living in houses or apartments, on average, have more living space per person than does the average citizen living in European countries such as England, France and Germany,” the Heritage study asserts. There’s a footnote–but the source material doesn’t include figures for per-capita housing density in Europe. (As far as I can tell, such data doesn’t exist.) Even if it’s true, though, it’s a factoid without a point. Europe, urbanized for the past 2000 years, has an overall higher population density than we do–yet enjoys the world’s highest standard of living.

The more you think about Heritage’s BS, the worse it gets.

“Three quarters of these ‘poor'”–note the quotes–own a car,” Rector continues. Are those cars in good working order, or up on blocks? He doesn’t say–but there’s a difference.

“When asked, [the typical ‘poor person’] reports that his family was able to obtain medical care whenever needed during the past year,” he continues. True–sorta. Uninsured people often rely on hospitals, enduring long waits and high fees for substandard care rendered by harried emergency room staffers. Hospitals are legally obligated to treat them–but it’s hardly a workable system. Many poor (and middle class) people put off going to the doctor as long as possible.

Then there’s this sparkling gem of compassion: “Some poor families,” admits Rector, “do experience a temporary food shortage, a condition touted as ‘hunger’ by activists. But even this condition is relatively rare: 89 percent of the poor report their families always have ‘enough’ food to eat, while only 2 percent say they ‘often’ do not have enough to eat.”

“Temporary food shortage.” If that isn’t hunger, what is? “Very simply,” says the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “hunger is defined as the uneasy or painful sensation caused by lack of food. When we talk about hunger in America, we refer to the ability of people to obtain sufficient food for their household. Some people may find themselves skipping meals or cutting back on the quality or quantity of food they purchase at the stores. This recurring and involuntary lack of access to food can lead to malnutrition over time.”

Economists consider a society’s infant mortality rate to be the most reliable indicator of its citizens’ quality of life, and the prevalence of poverty. The United States has the second-worst infant morality rate in the industrialized world–behind Latvia, tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia. Western Europe–France, Germany, etc.–kicks our national ass. The poverty rate for American children under 18 was 21.9 percent in 2006, the highest in the developed world.

Upwardly mobile Americans can escape poverty numerous ways–by, for example, earning a college scholarship. But we also suffer a lot of downward mobility, typically after losing a job. “While in any given year 12 to 15 percent of the population is poor,” says Michael Zweig, author of “What’s Class Got To Do With It, American Society in the 21st Century” (2004), “over a ten-year period 40 percent experience poverty in at least one year because most poor people cycle in and out of poverty.”
Even the Heritage Foundation concedes that some poverty exists in this best of all possible laissez faire worlds. But, they argue in the finest tradition of blame-the-victim, it’s “self-inflicted, a result of poor decisions and self-defeating behaviors.”

Poor Americans, they say, have a “weak work ethic.” The evidence: “The typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year–16 hours per week. “If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year–the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week throughout the year–nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.” This assumes that poor parents live in a magical job market where they can work as many hours as they please–a condition that would only exist with zero percent unemployment.

“Father absence is another major cause of child poverty,” says Heritage’s poverty study. True. “Nearly two-thirds of poor children reside in single-parent homes; each year, an additional 1.3 million children are born out of wedlock.” Again true. The conservative solution: “If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, almost three-quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty.” Stupid welfare queens! Why do they refuse to marry the fathers of their children?

A cat or dog understands hunger. The fact that we have to have this discussion demonstrates the success of the right in redefining basic terms–and the failure of the press to question it.

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL